tape to keep these people back.”
“Yes, sir.” Brad excitedly fumbled with his keys to open the trunk. The kid was so new to the job that his mother still ironed his uniforms. He’d spent the last three months writing tickets and cleaning up after traffic accidents. This was Brad’s first case involving a fatality.
Jeffrey took in the scene as he made his way up the street. Older cars and trucks lined the road. IHOP was a working-class neighborhood, but to be frank, it was nicer than the one Jeffrey had grown up in. There were only a few boarded-up windows. The majority of the lawns were tidy. Lightbulbs still glowed in the floodlights. The paint was peeling, but the curtains were clean, and everyone had dutifully lined up their trashcans on the curb for pick-up.
Jeffrey opened the lid on the closest can. The bin was empty.
He spotted his team standing in a wide, open field that ran behind the houses. The forest was just beyond the rise, at least one hundred yards away. Jeffrey stepped out of the street. There wasn’t a sidewalk. He walked through a vacant lot, carefully scanning the ground as he followed a worn path through the grass. Cigarette butts. Beer bottles. Wadded-up pieces of aluminum foil. Jeffrey leaned down for a better look. He caught a whiff of cat urine.
“Chief.” Lena Adams jogged to meet him. The young officer’s blue uniform jacket was so big that it rode up under her chin. Jeffrey made a mental note to look into women’s sizes the next time he ordered uniforms. Lena wasn’t going to complain, but he was embarrassed by the oversight.
He asked, “You were the responding officer?”
“Yes, sir.” She started to read from her notebook. “The nine-one-one call came in from a cell phone at 5:58 a.m. I was dispatched at that time and arrived at this location at 6:02. The caller met me in the middle of the field at 6:03. Officer Brad Stephens arrived to assist at 6:04. Truong then took us to the location. I verified the victim was deceased at 6:08. I assessed the position of the body and noted a large, blood-covered rock by the victim’s head. I called Detective Wallace at 6:09. We then taped off the area around the body and awaited Frank’s arrival at 6:22.”
Frank had called Jeffrey en route. He already knew the details, but he nodded for Lena to continue. The only way you learned how to do something was to do something.
Lena read, “Victim is a white female between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, dressed in red running shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt with a Grant Tech logo. She was found by another student, Leslie Truong, age twenty-two. Truong walks this path four-to-five times a week. She goes to the lake to do tai chi. Truong didn’t know the victim, but she was pretty upset all the same. I offered to radio a car to drive her to the campus nurse. She said she wanted to walk it off, take some time to think. She struck me as the woo-woo type.”
Jeffrey’s jaw had tightened. “You let her walk back to campus on her own?”
“Yes, Chief. She was going to see the nurse. I made her promise she’d—”
“That’s at least a twenty-minute hike, Lena. All by herself.”
“She said she wanted—”
“Stop.” Jeffrey worked to maintain an even tone. Most of policing was learning through mistakes. “Don’t do that again. We turn over witnesses to family or friends. We don’t send them on a two-mile hike.”
“But, she—”
Jeffrey shook his head, but now wasn’t the time to lecture Lena about compassion. “I want to talk to Truong before the day is out. Even if she didn’t know the victim, what she saw was traumatic. She needs to know that someone is in charge and looking out for people.”
Lena gave a perfunctory nod.
Jeffrey gave up. “When you got here, the victim was lying on her back?”
“Yes, sir.” Lena thumbed to the back of her notebook. She had made a crude drawing of the body in relation to a stand of trees. “The rock was to the right of her head. Her chin was turned slightly to the left. The ground was undisturbed. She didn’t turn over. She landed on her back and hit her head.”
“We’ll let the coroner make that determination.” He pointed to the foil. “Someone was smoking meth recently. Junkies are creatures of habit. I want you to pull all the incident reports for the last three